Latest / So There I Was / Drop & Give Me 1 Episode 195
Transcript
- 0:00Quiet, numbskulls, I'm broadcasting. Hello, you're listening to the podcast, so there I was.
- 0:06This is episode 195.
- 0:09Drop and give me one.
- 0:12Only in the Air Guard will you hear. Actually, what was that?
- 0:17The Institute of Military Science?
- 0:20I think, yeah, Academy of Military Science. Academy of Military Science?
- 0:24Like it matters, but yeah. Right. Drop and give me one. Oh my goodness,
- 0:29I can't believe. How awesome is that?
- 0:31What a fun show we had with Chubbs, who flew A7s in the Ohio Guard,
- 0:37then on to F-16s, had a wonderful career at the airlines where he was managing
- 0:42director of training for the MD-11 and did all kinds of stuff and verified one
- 0:49of my stories about a captain last week who was less than congenial with his crew in...
- 0:57Less than excellent with the cockpit resource management skills. Exactly.
- 1:02You know, sometimes. What are you going to do? Sometimes good shit happens to bad people.
- 1:07Exactly. In this case. So a couple quick notes. I have set up a Venmo.
- 1:12So there I was, .us slash donate.
- 1:15The first option is Venmo. If you donate to us and you do it through DonorBox,
- 1:20you know, they take 10 or 12%. If you do it through Patreon,
- 1:23they take 10 or 12%, depending on the level that you give. They don't always take quite that much.
- 1:29And Venmo tends to take more like 2%. So we'd appreciate that if you would consider doing that.
- 1:35The other thing is a thank you to our sponsor, dstartworks.net.
- 1:40We talk about it during the show and some amazing, amazing artwork that this man produces.
- 1:48It's a true artist. Absolutely true artist. It is art. If you need custom military
- 1:52emblems like your wings, like squadron patch, anything along those lines,
- 1:58even something as small as a bottle opener, go to dcartworks.net,
- 2:02reach out to Derek and get something custom made for you. I don't think size is an issue either.
- 2:08I mean, we saw, what is that? He did like a three-foot diameter squadron patch.
- 2:12Three-foot, four-foot squadron emblems in steel. Cut steel. At a metal.
- 2:17Four-foot. Four-foot. I'm getting sticks to give me the hand and arm signals.
- 2:20Four-foot. yeah yeah amazing amazing true artist,
- 2:24All-American made by DC himself. To have him join us as a sponsor.
- 2:30So we talked all kinds of things. A lot of airline stuff, you know,
- 2:34about how much mergers suck because they do. Yeah. There's not one good thing about it.
- 2:39Everybody hates everybody. No. Okay. So both airlines survive when maybe one
- 2:45or two wouldn't otherwise.
- 2:46But yeah. But, you know, at least, at least hatred is spread. but among the ranks.
- 2:51And then, you know, it's, and then there's some good ones, but it's always hard. Change is hard.
- 2:57And when you're merging two airlines, it's probably, it's never easy.
- 3:03Because we talk about seniority and why seniority is important and why,
- 3:07well, plain and simple, mergers suck because they screw with your seniority.
- 3:14So we talked briefly about Bacchus who flew west this week, as they say.
- 3:19Show 118 put the thing on the thing so god bless bacchus and your family sorry
- 3:24to see him go tailwinds brother yeah exactly,
- 3:30He talked about a lieutenant assault vehicle, which was off the charts funny.
- 3:35Don't ruin it. Don't say anything else. The lieutenant assault vehicle. It assaulted.
- 3:41That's all I'll say. That's a great story.
- 3:46You know, in the typical life of a professional cargo pilot.
- 3:53Right. And what crazy schedules and crazy things you actually do.
- 4:01Right. And especially when you do it at his level, which was what we call a pathfinder.
- 4:06We talk about him being a pathfinder and all the extra fun that that entailed.
- 4:12So I think we shouldn't talk about it anymore. We should get out of the way
- 4:17and let Chubbs talk about it.
- 4:19What do you think, man? Well, let's get out of the way. Let's do it.
- 4:23Don't don't go to the cockpit without briefing your FO. Don't do it.
- 4:28Don't lay down on the futon without extra blankets.
- 4:35Without extra blankets.
- 5:19So there I was, 1,500 feet out from the airport in Stansted,
- 5:25England, with a student in the right seat of the MD-11 on his IOE.
- 5:30And as we're coming in, he had to do a 50-flap landing.
- 5:34So 1,500 feet, five miles from the end of the runway, we go from flaps 35 to
- 5:39flaps 50, and the airplane rolls up to 45 to 60 degrees in a left-hand bank.
- 5:45No. No.
- 5:48Oh, yeah.
- 5:51No, fuck no. That sounds horrible. That's a giant airplane that loaded the ground.
- 5:57That big angle of bank. Oh, my God. It was horrible.
- 6:01Okay. Well, holy shit. That is a terrifying So There I Was opener.
- 6:07Welcome, everyone, to So There I Was. This is Fig. I'm coming to you from Denver.
- 6:13Where's my cohorts?
- 6:18I can't hear you. Co-host is home in New Hampshire tonight where it's fixing
- 6:24to get scary cold as they put it on Seinfeld where he wears that big puffy jacket.
- 6:29I don't have my big puffy Gore-Tex jacket like George Costanza,
- 6:33but man, it's going to get that way.
- 6:36Greetings, everybody. Repeat here and thrilled and honored and privileged to
- 6:40welcome to the show with us tonight, Chubbs.
- 6:44Coming to us from... Fort Lickerdale, where I'm guessing it's not quite as cold,
- 6:47but it's awful cold for Florida.
- 6:50It is, man. It's raining and windy. What's considered cold for Fort Lickerdale, Chubbs?
- 6:57About 65 degrees, I guess. I don't live here. I'm just on a trip. So it's snowing at home.
- 7:05All right. Well, holy shit. Well, I'm glad you're there and safe.
- 7:09And that's a terrifying, fucking terrifying opener. Right. So repeat.
- 7:16Well, the good news is you didn't start out as a Czech airman on the MD-11,
- 7:21which we both love that airplane.
- 7:25It was definitely a varsity airplane, and we talked about that before.
- 7:27But where did you start out in airplanes? Whence did you look in the sky and go, I want to do that?
- 7:34So I grew up in Groveport, Ohio, right off the end of the runway at Rickenbacker Air Force Base.
- 7:40And playing little league baseball. We'd look up in the sky and watch tankers
- 7:43flying over all the time.
- 7:45And I didn't realize at the time there were F-100s and A-7s.
- 7:49And my favorite teacher in high school flew World War II fighters.
- 7:54And I took an aviation course from him my senior year in high school.
- 7:58But I really didn't plan on doing any flying.
- 8:00And then I enlisted in the Guard because I need money to go to school.
- 8:04Found out that you could fly in the Guard.
- 8:06That they actually select their own pilots. yeah so
- 8:09it's kind of cool i got i got to fly at home overhead pattern
- 8:13went over my parents house i went flew with two guys with the high school with
- 8:17what were you flying a7s no shit that's fucking badass man overhead pattern
- 8:27over my parents house man yeah how much fun is that i That's so cool.
- 8:34Dude, Bagel had that up. Was that a picture of Ohio Guard?
- 8:37That was a Rickenbacker A7. No shit. Look at that. Yeah. Yeah.
- 8:42Yeah. Let me take the banner now. But yeah. I flew that numerous times.
- 8:46It's a nice looking jet, man.
- 8:47It is, man. It was a squadron commander's jet.
- 8:52Single engine, single seat attack, nothing finer. Flying low and slow.
- 8:59All right. I want to come back to that. So when did you go to flight school? What year was that?
- 9:06So I went to Columbus, Mississippi in January of 1982.
- 9:12Graduated in November. Actually, November 30th of 82.
- 9:16Then went to Fighter League and then in Alamogordo, New Mexico,
- 9:18Holloman Air Force Base. And then for three months, they went to Tucson for
- 9:22six months to learn how to fly the A-7.
- 9:24Was that where the RAG or the RTU was? The RTU. Yeah. Yeah. That was Tucson?
- 9:28Okay. So it was a guard deal, right?
- 9:31And the guard, if it was a good deal, they would extend it. If it was a shitty
- 9:36deal, they'd make it short.
- 9:38So officer school and the guard at that time was in Knoxville.
- 9:40It was only six weeks long instead of three months.
- 9:43And then RTU, when the Air Force had the A-7, it was three months.
- 9:47The Guard made it six months and didn't add an event to the syllabus.
- 9:53That's back when the Guard was awesome, right? Oh, yeah, because they had this big stamp, you know.
- 9:58I don't know if you saw it, Fig, when you were in the Guard,
- 10:01but if there were regs that the Guard didn't like, they just had the stamp said
- 10:06not applicable to the A-NG, and they stamped it on there.
- 10:09I never saw that stamp. Oh, yeah, so a book would be like this in the Air Force,
- 10:13and the Guard would be like that.
- 10:15Nice. Yeah. Oh, yeah. How awesome is that? That was a good old day.
- 10:19That was some common sense.
- 10:20It was a flying plane. I mean, well, it really was. So three months of school
- 10:23all crammed into six months. That's fantastic. It was. It really was.
- 10:28Maybe fly once or twice a week.
- 10:30You've got to tell us. Right? I know, right?
- 10:34You've got to tell us, though. I mean, six weeks of officer school,
- 10:37it had to be grueling. Tell us about it.
- 10:39Yeah. It was really grueling. Knoxville, Tennessee, the Academy of Military
- 10:46Science, it's a guard officer school.
- 10:49Six weeks. Yeah, the first week, I guess the fun part, the first week, it was all fun.
- 10:55On Friday night, it was hell night.
- 10:58Oh, okay. Yeah. A friend of mine and I were in the gym playing basketball,
- 11:03and we heard this commotion. No ladies at the Oak Club?
- 11:06We couldn't go to the Oak Club then. Wait, hold on a second.
- 11:08You're at Officer Candidate School, and Friday night you're in the gym playing basketball.
- 11:12So all of a sudden, my record's off the – Well, wait until you hear this big.
- 11:18There's commotion outside.
- 11:19My friend Dave and I are saying they're looking outside, and it's like – and
- 11:23one of the guys that worked in the gym, he goes, you guys might want to go out for that.
- 11:27So it was hell night, and we're out there on the parade ground,
- 11:31and the instructors are giving us a bunch of shit, and one of the instructors
- 11:35looks at one of the – The officer candidate says, drop and give me one.
- 11:39And everybody lost their shit. The instructors will have to go, okay, we're done.
- 11:46But the good thing about that, you know, the old barracks where you have,
- 11:49you know, the two stories, you've got a day room in the center.
- 11:52Yes. Well, on the second floor, there's a gold bar, they called it.
- 11:56And that was the opening of the gold bar. And it was open for every night from 8 to 10.
- 12:00You go up there, you can drink all you wanted. The last call was 10 o'clock,
- 12:03you buy a six-pack at 10 o'clock at night.
- 12:07That was off.
- 12:10So, okay, so hell night started with some kind of commotion.
- 12:17You went out of the gym and then there was the, there was some ruckus and it
- 12:22was all right, get down and give me one.
- 12:25Drop and give me one. Give me a pushup.
- 12:28And that was that. That was that. Dude.
- 12:33So bad. So wait till you hear the rest of this big. So on week four,
- 12:37the honor flight could go to the O club and go off base.
- 12:43On week five, everybody else could go to the O-Club.
- 12:46So we would go with our flight commander and we drank with him.
- 12:49And then the last week, because we could go off base, because we started out
- 12:52on our flight and our goal was to graduate. And we went from the top to the bottom.
- 12:57And so the last week we drank with our flight commander and we drive him home.
- 13:04That was it. Wow. That was AMS. So there's no crazy stories.
- 13:12I mean, nobody freaked out and DOR'd and left.
- 13:16No, it was too easy.
- 13:19It was. Now I know for a fact that had I known about the Air Guard,
- 13:24I would never have flown in the Marine Corps.
- 13:26It's the best kept secret in the world. How many officer candidates were in your class, roughly?
- 13:33Oh, God. I think there were 76.
- 13:37I think maybe. Was it just one class there at a time type thing?
- 13:40Yeah, one class at a time. so you're there for six weeks and i think they took
- 13:44a week off then they bring another class in for another six weeks wow so i i've
- 13:48been to knoxville and i stayed where you stayed when i was doing some advanced
- 13:54pme shit for the guard they had everybody there we were doing this,
- 13:58accelerated course you'd stay there for a week so i'm pretty sure i stayed pretty
- 14:01much where you guys were you know professional military education yes thank
- 14:05you for that and that and that was pretty nice area.
- 14:08It was It is. It's a wonderful area. You know? And so now knowing that that was where.
- 14:16Academy of military science ams is
- 14:19that what you call it yeah the academy we really
- 14:21fucked up repeat the academy the academy the
- 14:24academy of military science well that's outstanding
- 14:28so from there you went to upt upt well
- 14:31i went to flight screening first in hondo texas okay okay
- 14:35tell us about that what's that process like
- 14:38yeah what's that look like so so you go down to hondo and so
- 14:42the air force had their flight screening program there and that
- 14:45at that time we stayed the medina annex of
- 14:49lachlan air force base and that was where their officer school was so they had
- 14:54fish pots the guys the people that are going through flight screening they call
- 14:59them fish pots so they had their own dorm and then you had the the ots students
- 15:03you know officer training school students on the same campus.
- 15:08That's the active duty positive training.
- 15:13So we show up first day we go to the fish pot dorm and because we've got academics, right?
- 15:22We walk in the dorm and this guy says, room 10 hut!
- 15:25And all of us just braced up against the wall. There's like 8 or 10 of us.
- 15:29And we stand there for what seemed like five minutes. All of a sudden,
- 15:32we looked like, wait a minute, he called the room to attention for us.
- 15:35Because we were lieutenants down there.
- 15:43You're locking your body up for yourself. Oh, that's great. We were.
- 15:49So it's a month down there. And we had a great time because on Friday night,
- 15:55I think there were eight of us.
- 15:56And we had all gone to officer school together. so two guys
- 15:59each weekend were responsible for getting a car and we'd
- 16:02rent a car and go downtown san antonio on friday night okay that
- 16:06doesn't sound bad first weekend we were there i i
- 16:09get back home and saturday morning i got bruises all over my body oh no because
- 16:14at the old hemisphere where they had the world's fair and i think was 68 they
- 16:19still had bumper cars well we had been drinking and we decided we're gonna ride
- 16:24the bumper cars well i don't know why not we beat the shit out of each other.
- 16:32So what what'd you call that time down there?
- 16:35Pre-flight screening? Flight screening? Flight screening. What was the airplane you guys were flying?
- 16:41T-41. Cessna 172. The Air Force version of it. Okay. And was the purpose was
- 16:48just to make sure you didn't get,
- 16:50you know, constantly air sick. The purpose, it was for people that I didn't
- 16:53have a license when I went down.
- 16:56So the Air Force does it now. I think it's in Pueblo, Colorado.
- 17:00And they sent, they used to send people to an FBO to get their license.
- 17:05Then they moved to Pueblo after they closed Honda.
- 17:07And it was just to see if you had the capability to make it through a pilot train.
- 17:12Okay. Yeah. There's no guarantee. Sure. Right.
- 17:17So, yeah, just an orientation, I guess, more than anything.
- 17:21Yeah. Yeah. You soloed. I think, I know I soloed there. I was there a couple
- 17:26of months ago with the job that I was working at that time.
- 17:28And first time I'd been back since 1981.
- 17:32So was it changed a lot or was it?
- 17:36The Air Force, well, the Air Force has gone there. So yeah. Okay.
- 17:39I don't remember it that much. I mean, I was, I was so oblivious to anything around me.
- 17:45I totally get it. I understand. I'm not going to, I'm not going to press you on that. But thank you.
- 17:52I thought Hondo, Texas was way the hell out of the middle of nowhere.
- 17:55That was just, is it just outside of San Antonio?
- 17:58It's about an hour out of San Antonio.
- 18:01Okay. Okay. Yeah. We take a bus every day, you know.
- 18:05And if you had a, most of the time you only flew once. If you had a long day,
- 18:09you know, you got to go to the great restaurant that was in town, Sonic.
- 18:14That was the only thing they had. Yes. The. Yes. The. The Sonic. Thank you.
- 18:20Wow, okay. And then on to UPT after that?
- 18:24On to UPT, Columbus, Mississippi. Okay.
- 18:29So you and Fig were practically neighbors. Fig was a meridiot?
- 18:32Yeah, I was a meridiot. When were you there?
- 18:34Oh, you were there a couple years. I was there, I got there in the fall of 88.
- 18:40Okay. I got there, actually, yeah, August of 88. September, August of 88.
- 18:47You're long ago by then, I'm sure. August of 88, I was getting off probation
- 18:51at my first real airline job. Awesome.
- 18:54Awesome. Can I say the name, Pete, since they're not around anymore? Flying Tigers.
- 18:59Flying Tigers. That's a precursor to another big airline, I do believe.
- 19:03It is. The international portion of that other airline.
- 19:09So the original Flying Tigers, what kind of aircraft were you flying?
- 19:13I was a 7.4 engineer, 747, for five and a half years. Okay.
- 19:20Yeah. So well, and you know, the beauty of the guard is that at that time,
- 19:25the air force had a six year commitment for graduating from pilot training when I graduated.
- 19:30Okay. And I got hired at Tigers a year and a half before anybody in my pilot
- 19:33training class could get out of the air force.
- 19:37Yeah. Oh yeah. How about that? And as you guys know, seniority is everything. Everything. Right.
- 19:44Yeah, that's money. That's so, that is so money.
- 19:48Every day is a number and people don't think that that's true, but it is true.
- 19:53The guy that hired you the day before you will always have a better schedule than you. Always.
- 19:57Yeah. But you know, Pete, you know, there's a thing, you know,
- 20:00you have a good schedule if it's what you like to do.
- 20:04Right. And because I had guys who were senior to me, people at the old place
- 20:09I retired from and they were senior to me, but they didn't like to do what I
- 20:13like to do. So I got what I wanted every month for my last five years.
- 20:18Nice. It was. When you retired, what number were you?
- 20:2754, I believe, in the company. Number 10 on the 777. That's pretty fucking awesome. Yeah.
- 20:33But you know what it means? It just means I'm old.
- 20:37I got hired before everybody. But I mean, it's awesome because I know what that
- 20:40means. That means you had a great quality of life. Let's just put it that way.
- 20:46I did. I did. I would bid trips that had a deadhead at the back end,
- 20:50and I would get home at least a day early from the schedule.
- 20:54Hey, for our non-airline pilot listeners, what does that mean,
- 20:59deadhead on the back end?
- 21:01So the company at the end of the trip would schedule a flight on an airline.
- 21:06And so I would go from pretty much Asia back, and I lived in Arizona at the time.
- 21:13So they'd fly us back to either LA or San Francisco, and we could change our
- 21:17flight so we didn't have to do what they scheduled all the time.
- 21:21And so instead of laying over in San Francisco, I'd schedule something that
- 21:25got me home where I'd get to San Francisco, just switch airplanes and go home.
- 21:30Right. So I'd get home at least a day early. Oh, that's great.
- 21:35Bagos dropping pictures of probably six years. That picture is in there too, yeah.
- 21:40That 7.4 on the tail. Had a 7.4 on its tail, yeah.
- 21:44I believe that's in Frankfurt, and they had a pallet slide through the back
- 21:49end of the airplane. Oh, shit.
- 21:51Yeah. So, yeah. I mean, that's why you still go into Cologne,
- 21:57and UPS has these great big poles that extend down from the back of the 747
- 22:02to keep it from landing on its tail when they load it back.
- 22:07So did that happen when it was stationary?
- 22:11No. Or was it taxiing and it rolled? Oh, it was taxiing. No, that was takeoff.
- 22:16What? They rotate, and the cargo shift, and the captain was able to reject.
- 22:22And it ended up on its tail just like that. Yeah.
- 22:25I believe that's that picture of it. Yeah.
- 22:31Well, good for him getting it stopped then because we all remember the horrible video out of Baghdad.
- 22:36Or not Baghdad, Bagram, where National Airlines had a cargo shift that killed that whole crew.
- 22:44That was horrific to watch. Horrific to watch. It was. It was.
- 22:48It's a positive attitude. Who put that up there?
- 22:53Somebody's comment. That's dicks. That's a comment in the thing,
- 22:59which was actually… Hey, the Reverend Barry Moore is on here.
- 23:02Hey, Barry Moore. There you go.
- 23:04Barry's in there. But earlier, Diz said he remembered the DC-8s.
- 23:07You ever fly the DC-8s at Tigers?
- 23:11No, I did not. They started buying them right before I got hired.
- 23:15And then when they were bought by another company, they got rid of the DC-8s
- 23:21after, I think it was a couple of years.
- 23:23Okay. so that was guys told stories about the DCA it was just incredible,
- 23:32I still remember. So I got there after about five years after Flying Tigers
- 23:39was born, but it was still pretty hostile in the cockpit every now and then.
- 23:45You'd get a purple guy and a silver guy and think, man, they're going to have
- 23:49a fist fight and I'm going to get my first landing.
- 23:51I'm a flight engineer, but they're going to knock each other out.
- 23:54I'm going to get a landing.
- 23:55You know, I never saw any of that, Pete, because I stayed on the 7-4 for another
- 24:01three and a half years after the merger.
- 24:03So I was just flying with Tiger guys.
- 24:07Okay, I'm going to show my ignorance here. And I thought that it just morphed
- 24:13into that other airline. I didn't realize there was a merger.
- 24:17No, $750 million.
- 24:21That's what it cost. Bottom out rate, yeah. So how many pilots got rolled into
- 24:27how many pilots? Do you recall?
- 24:30Roughly about 800 each seniority list. Oh, okay. So pretty much went one for one.
- 24:38You know, the guys that got hurt the most were the fairly mid-level Tiger guys
- 24:45because Flying Tigers had bought Seaboard World,
- 24:49and they merged those guys, and they got put pretty much to the bottom because
- 24:52they were junior, and now they lost more seniority with the merger.
- 24:56But they ended up doing well, you know? Yeah.
- 24:59But the lawsuits ended somewhere around 2003, if I recall. Oh,
- 25:03my gosh. Is that when it was?
- 25:04Yeah. Yeah, there were lawsuits flying for decades.
- 25:09Well, those things are never easy. And for our non-aviation,
- 25:14non-airline listeners, when you merge two seniority lists at airlines, even...
- 25:21Someone's always going to be pissed. No one's going to be happy. Yeah, no.
- 25:25And it can be very emotional. It can be very... Well, you know,
- 25:30if you don't have the right attitude, it'll ruin your life.
- 25:32You'll be angry for the rest of your life. Which is no way to be.
- 25:38And in some cases, justifiably so. I mean, you know, I had a buddy,
- 25:41he was at TWA, and they got bought by American Airlines.
- 25:45And of course, he wore the American Airlines uniform for about two months, then got furloughed.
- 25:50And there were guys hired after he got furloughed that were flying the line.
- 25:55And he was still out on furlough. And so he, needless to say,
- 26:00he resents American and he, and he resents the union who sold them out because
- 26:04they thought he believes that the union was sold out to TWA guys in order to
- 26:11get favor with the American pilots,
- 26:13hoping they would come back into the union.
- 26:16So weird. Yeah. My only thing on that with the TWA is what did they do to the
- 26:20Ozark pilots when they bought Ozark?
- 26:24You boys sit over there in the corner when we get to you that's right,
- 26:31what goes around comes around I hate to say that but Fig put it right,
- 26:38someone's going to be miserable we went way sideways.
- 26:46Let's come back for a second I'm going to ask Chubbs when you were fighter lead
- 26:51in or whatever you call it when you're flying the A-7. The T-38.
- 26:56Oh, T-38. Before you went to RTU. Flight school. Was there any fun happening
- 27:00there? Yeah, any crazy shit happened?
- 27:03Not really crazy shit. It was just a lot of fun. I mean, the craziest thing
- 27:07that I had happen, in all honesty, because it's pretty benign,
- 27:10you know, I mean, you're learning how to fight.
- 27:12You know, that was pilot training. There we go.
- 27:15And there are four of us in there that work with Pete, so –,
- 27:20Oh, no kidding. All right. Yeah. But anyway, at fighter lead-in.
- 27:23I had a picture of his T-38 class up on the screen for the listeners.
- 27:27So two things happened at fighter lead-in that were kind of – one day we're
- 27:33going to the range, and the instructor that I had was an old A-7 guy.
- 27:38So the flight commander is briefing the flight, and he looks at me and he goes,
- 27:42hey, would you explain about offset aiming for me?
- 27:45Which offset aiming is, as you guys know, it's based on, you know,
- 27:48your wind correction and how you're going to aim to drop your bombs, right?
- 27:52I look over at my instructor, and he kind of chuckles at me,
- 27:55and he goes, and just chuckle, and I look at the flight command,
- 27:59and I go, it doesn't mean shit to me because I'm going to be dropping computed bombs.
- 28:04He looks at me and goes, fuck you, and asks the next guy the question.
- 28:13Right? Yeah.
- 28:17I mean, the other method was TLR, right? That looks about right.
- 28:21Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, dropping computer bombs with the A7 because
- 28:25it had an INS, inertial navigation system, and the A7 was a great bomber.
- 28:32So I'm like, yeah, I'm going to be dropping computer bombs. I don't care.
- 28:36Who's top speed on that? Was it right at my point? The A7? Yeah.
- 28:41Uh about 9.9293 it
- 28:45was not supersonic okay you know i don't
- 28:48think you can even get a supersonic in a dive because of
- 28:51that big mouth in the front of it it was a big
- 28:53speed break yeah as as where
- 28:56the intakes on a harrier but you could get the harrier to 1.0 well
- 29:00i don't know at least
- 29:03the harrier had a pointed nose yeah it did yeah yeah
- 29:07no i i got a harrier to 1.02 or
- 29:10something like that got my ass chewed for it so i
- 29:16couldn't get it to go straight down
- 29:20full pound i couldn't get it to go of course
- 29:23you know it was probably pilot technique well
- 29:26i also did it on a slick bird and on a pmcf oh
- 29:30well okay then there's that all right
- 29:33i had probably with no shit hanging off
- 29:36the off the wings you can do that sort of thing yeah yeah
- 29:39you can oh man so so was
- 29:43the was the rtu in tucson was
- 29:46it a that was the guard was there international people
- 29:50flying no not in the a7 okay not
- 29:53in a7 i i went out to tucson in the.
- 29:56Guard in january of 89 and they
- 29:59had just gotten dutch students then so and
- 30:03at that time part-timers weren't allowed to fly with dutch
- 30:06students because that was the contract that the dutch signed and january 89
- 30:11did you go out there to be an instructor yeah i did oh nice i spent my last
- 30:15five and a half years there i was one of the lucky ones they offered a 15-year
- 30:19retirement in 94 and i pulled the cord man i'm out of here wow yeah.
- 30:27Well, how many hours did you get? There you go. Speaking of guys being happy
- 30:32and unhappy, I got 16 good years, and I didn't even get a boot in the ass. Yeah.
- 30:36Well, I had two and a half years of enlisted time before I went to pilot training.
- 30:40So I got 1,500 hours in the A7 and 300 hours in the F-16.
- 30:45We completely glossed over the whole enlisted time thing here.
- 30:49I'm assuming that was also in the Ohio Guard?
- 30:51In the Ohio Guard, I loaded bombs for two and a half years.
- 30:54Okay. That was so much fun. It really was.
- 30:59Because we got to go. I love to travel, and I got to go wherever the airplanes went sometimes.
- 31:05How would they move you around? They pick you up in a C-130 and take you out
- 31:08there a week ahead of time so you meet the planes when they came in?
- 31:11So we would go. The state airplane was a C-131, old Convair.
- 31:17They had C-123s in the reserves at Rickenbacker. And I remember we flew from
- 31:21England to Rickenbacker one day, and it took like eight hours.
- 31:24They had to stop for fuel. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
- 31:30That's about right.
- 31:33Let the clocks back. Everybody needed a shave and a haircut by the time they
- 31:39got to where they were going. Yeah.
- 31:41It was a air guard, so maybe not. Okay.
- 31:45There you go. Okay. And a question from Barry is CCIP in the HUD in the A-7.
- 31:53Barry, I believe that it was the first airplane that dropped computed bombs.
- 31:58And I know CCIP was incredible in the A-7.
- 32:02Constantly computed impact point. Yeah, it was in the A-4 or in the Harrier,
- 32:06too. Son of a bitch, it was accurate.
- 32:08That's where you put the thing on the thing. Just put the thing on the thing.
- 32:12Oh, so the A-7 had a, you had the bomb fall line up and down,
- 32:17and then you had a line that came up, and when it intersected your target,
- 32:22that's where you dropped.
- 32:24Okay, yeah. Because the F-16 had a circle, and you put the circle over the thing.
- 32:29Just put the thing on the thing.
- 32:31And I want to take, I'm sorry, just a second here to acknowledge we lost Bacchus this week.
- 32:38Bacchus' show, 118, I believe, and that show is entitled, You Put the Thing on the Thing.
- 32:44Bacchus was fighting cancer a year ago when he visited with us.
- 32:48A little, actually, closer to two years ago. Was it that long ago?
- 32:53Yeah. It doesn't seem right. Yeah, it was 2024.
- 32:56And, uh, Bacchus was a retired brigadier general, retired Boston air Boston
- 33:01center supervisor and retired also from what a great gentleman.
- 33:06You would never know that the guy was a general officer in the military.
- 33:10Just as humble as can be happy, as happy as can be to pour you a cup of coffee and.
- 33:16Do anything he could for you. And what a great gentleman. So our first to Bacchus and his family.
- 33:23Episode 118. Put the thing on the thing. Put the thing on the thing.
- 33:27Anyway, I'm sorry. I've taken us down a sad rabbit hole.
- 33:31It doesn't have to be sad. We can celebrate him, man. The man was awesome.
- 33:36Yeah. Here's to Bacchus. Raise a glass, man.
- 33:39God bless you. Throw a nickel in the grass.
- 33:44All right, then. Yeah. Okay. F-16s. So when they transitioned to the F-16s, you were there for that?
- 33:52Yeah. Well, when I got out there, they already had F-16s. So they were running
- 33:56two RTUs, the F-16 and the A-7 at the same time.
- 33:59And then the Air Force phased out the A-7s after the first Gulf War and about
- 34:0694 was, I think 94 was the last A-7 flight in the Air Force or in the GARP.
- 34:11And so it was 92 that I went through F-16 school. So I had to take seven months off from work.
- 34:19And it was, the transition was fairly simple.
- 34:24We had to have a hundred hours from the time we started until we finished,
- 34:27including the instructor course so we could teach.
- 34:30Okay. And, but the difference, I could go in Tucson, fly in the A7.
- 34:37I could be gone for a week or three or four weeks and come back.
- 34:41And within 15 minutes, I felt comfortable in the airplane.
- 34:44The F-16, I would go for three or four weeks, come back, and it'd take me about
- 34:49a week before I started getting comfortable again.
- 34:51Okay. Because I flew the A7 as a lieutenant. I flew a lot, you know? Yeah.
- 34:55Yeah. Okay. Right. It was like a nice pair of jeans, your old pair of jeans. Yeah. It was. Yeah.
- 35:03Well, I would imagine the F-16 was probably a lot more HOTAS,
- 35:07hands-on throttle and stick and computer. It was.
- 35:09Yeah, that was. As opposed to just flying.
- 35:12Yeah, you had to learn how to do all that stuff. I mean, that was more of the
- 35:16air to air. Dropping bombs is easy, man.
- 35:18So the A-7 was a pilot's plane. I mean, you had to fly it. The F-16 was fly-by-wire.
- 35:25Yeah. Well, the other thing, the A-7 would talk to you. You could feel the airplane.
- 35:30You know, you're making turns, and you could feel the airplane.
- 35:33It would talk to you. The F-16 was so smooth and clean, you had no idea what
- 35:36you were doing, speed-wise, unless you looked.
- 35:40Okay, that could be scary. That makes sense, actually. Yeah.
- 35:46And as they say, you got – or more than one person say you voted in the F-16.
- 35:51You didn't fly it. Yeah, there are three votes, man. You got one on it.
- 35:54It would go, okay, I'll give you this. Three votes, you got one. That's right.
- 36:00Oh, that's great. So, you ever hear the reason the F-16 has a candid seat like 30 degrees?
- 36:10In the cockpit. And the story they say is it's for pulling G's. It helps you. Okay.
- 36:19Yeah, the seat was too big. Was it also to get your head out of the way of the canopy?
- 36:23Oh, no. It was – the seat was too big, I think, to go straight up and down.
- 36:31Although refueling in the back seat, the probe would be right over your head.
- 36:37I mean, you're looking at it, hoping that they don't hit the canopy.
- 36:42Right. With the boom. Oh, shit.
- 36:46Yeah. Yeah, because the Air Force, they fly the boom into the receiver as opposed to Navy Marineway.
- 36:52Oh. We don't put the thing in the basket.
- 36:55Yeah. What about, so let me ask about ejecting. So if you're sitting back like
- 36:59that, if you pulled the handle, were the rails canted as well,
- 37:02or were the rails more straight up and the seat was just canted?
- 37:05I don't remember, to be honest with you. Yeah.
- 37:09It'd be interesting to see what the...
- 37:17The whole thing is you put your head back against the back of the seat when you eject.
- 37:24Right. As opposed to putting it down between your knees and kissing your ass
- 37:28goodbye. That's right. You do that when you're floating down. That's right.
- 37:33And the chute doesn't open. Yeah.
- 37:36I have a question to ask before we get too far down range. and I forget,
- 37:42I got an annotation here so I don't forget, Chubbs.
- 37:47How did you get Chubbs as a call sign? So that was the other story at Holloman.
- 37:52They had an operational readiness inspection, ORI, and so we had to go weigh in.
- 37:57And when I was in pilot training, I was always on the Fat Boy program.
- 38:00I had to go up every Monday morning with a great friend of mine who was at our
- 38:06old company, Pete, and we'd weigh in. We were never overweight,
- 38:10but we were within 10% of our max.
- 38:12So we had to go in and weigh in every Monday.
- 38:15Well, I'm at Holloman and they do the weigh in and they send a letter back to
- 38:21Rickenbacker and it goes up on the bulletin board in the squadron that,
- 38:25hey, he's within 10 pounds of his max.
- 38:27Well, one of the guys was down at MacDill in Tampa and he saw this ad in the
- 38:34newspaper, Chubby's Pizza. Yeah.
- 38:37So he puts it on the bulletin board and one of my buddies who was a former weapons
- 38:42loader and pilot, and he goes, oh, Chubbs.
- 38:47So that's how I got my call sign. That's that. Nice.
- 38:54We're putting up the picture under the HeFat General Store. In Kauai. In Kauai.
- 39:02That's fucking awesome. Yeah. Oh, man. Hey, you got to embrace it, man. Hey, man, I do.
- 39:10You can't fight it, you know? Oh, well, it's like shark. It's like blood in the water.
- 39:14If you try to fight something that they give you, you know, it's going to stick
- 39:19even worse. Matter of fact, it could get worse.
- 39:22Right? Yeah. Yeah. So my buddy, the name, his call sign is Butthead. There you go.
- 39:31I think Chubbs is an awesome call sign compared to Butthead.
- 39:34I think Chubbs is an awesome call sign, period. That's great. Thanks, man.
- 39:40Oh, man. You say the ladies at the club gave me that one.
- 39:47Hey, I don't think they'd say that. Oh, well, you know. Hold on a second.
- 39:50I don't get it. What do you mean? I'm getting a chubby.
- 40:00I know. I'm a sick bastard. I embrace it.
- 40:06Oh, man. Gee whiz, that went downhill.
- 40:10Oh, you know what else we passed up here? One of the notes you gave us was the
- 40:15Lieutenant Assault Vehicle.
- 40:18I'd like to hear about that, and then we want to chat about our sponsor.
- 40:23So the Lieutenant Assault Vehicle was not my vehicle.
- 40:27One of my buddies at Rickenbacker bought an old Crown Victoria police car.
- 40:34I think it was like $200 or $300. Landshark, that's right. And so the first
- 40:39time my ride in it is with our ops officer. We're going up to the security police.
- 40:43And Otis, my buddy, had just bought it. So when he'd step on the accelerator,
- 40:46he hadn't bolted the seats in yet.
- 40:49So we'd go flying backwards and stuff. You know, it still had the siren.
- 40:53You know, so they would go through at least two rear tires a week because they'd burn out places.
- 41:02Is we went up to Ohio State for water survival and stopped at one of the guy's
- 41:07houses in Upper Arlington, which is a really nice neighborhood in Columbus by Ohio State.
- 41:12And all of a sudden, we get ready to leave. And there's this cloud of smoke
- 41:19like an animal house, you know, when the cake comes through.
- 41:22Yes. Cloud of smoke with the siren going and just boom, we go.
- 41:27So, but at an air show, the Thunderbirds were there.
- 41:31And one of the old guys, older guys, we called them old guys there.
- 41:34They were young bucks and old bucks at Rickenbacker.
- 41:37And the young bucks were basically the lieutenants below. And the old bucks
- 41:42were majors and above. Captains were kind of in between.
- 41:47And at the air show. Depending on whether they were dicks or not,
- 41:49they were old bucks or young bucks. Yeah.
- 41:52The lieutenant's assault vehicle. So Lieutenant Salt Vico was camouflaged by the paint shop.
- 41:59And so at the air show, he gets stolen a couple of days before the air show.
- 42:04And on Saturday or Sunday, I forget which day at the air show,
- 42:08there's an announcement made that, you know, this car needs to be moved so the
- 42:13Thunderbirds can perform.
- 42:16Well, then five minutes later, you need to move this car.
- 42:20And then it's like my buddy, they announced his name. You need to move your car.
- 42:24Next thing we know, there's a helicopter flying over the middle of the air between
- 42:29the two runways at Rickenbacker with a car hanging below it.
- 42:32And I'm standing next to my buddy like we're laughing, right?
- 42:35They released the car. And it starts falling.
- 42:39And my buddy's like, wait a minute, that's my car. The trunk opened.
- 42:43His fucking clothes were flying out of it.
- 42:45And it hits the ground, smashes. Next day, the Sky Cops, you know,
- 42:50you guys know how Sky Cops are because they got a real good sense of humor.
- 42:53The car was maybe knee high. It was flattened that much. It's sitting in the parking lot in ops.
- 43:02And they come and they go, whose car is this? And one of my buddies,
- 43:06he goes, well, it's my roommate's.
- 43:09And so they write up the report. and his name that we ended up calling him Nick
- 43:15because we called him by his nickname. So they write down, Chip, nickname.
- 43:20And that was it. That was Lieutenant Assault Vehicle. And it went everywhere.
- 43:23I mean, there were times where you'd go out. We'd all go out,
- 43:27you know, to bars and stuff, the young guys.
- 43:29And somebody would borrow the keys. They'd go out, start, you know,
- 43:33burning rubber and blow a tire and walk inside with the siren still going.
- 43:43Oh man. Did he ever get his clothes back?
- 43:47I don't know if he did or not, but then they bought a hearse.
- 43:50So the money he got from it, because the old guys took up a collection,
- 43:54the young guy said, we're not paying for anything. Cause you guys screwed up.
- 43:57You're supposed to have a replacement for it to drop. And they didn't.
- 44:00So he bought a hearse and the hearse's name was Herschel.
- 44:05Of course it was. Why wouldn't it?
- 44:10That's fantastic. Well, and that makes complete sense.
- 44:14I heard all kinds of stories. Every squadron had a car.
- 44:18Every guard squadron had a car. I didn't know this. They called them IFR cars.
- 44:25Any kind of weather, you could just drive them. That was the one because my
- 44:31buddy bought it. It was his car.
- 44:36He lost his car at an air show. Well, that's a story. You don't hear that every day.
- 44:41No. And so it got stolen. You say it was stolen. Was it really stolen or did
- 44:44it get misappropriated for a while?
- 44:47So one of the guys in the squadron took it. And one of our guys was a Columbus police officer.
- 44:53So he kind of covered for him and said, hey, told the police station,
- 44:56if you get a call from this guy that his car is stolen, don't worry. We got it covered.
- 45:04Fantastic. Yeah. And put fixed by a collection. So that's, uh,
- 45:09you know, that's how USAA started, right?
- 45:11You know, officers insuring each other for, no insurance company,
- 45:17but, uh, you know, oh, well, no, that's fantastic.
- 45:20Well, so I want to chat briefly about our newest sponsor.
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- 48:13I mean, this guy does some amazing pieces. So thank you very much,
- 48:17Derek, for the... Spot on.
- 48:18For the artwork you've given us. Yeah. For those watching live,
- 48:22there's one over my shoulder here.
- 48:24Behind me, my winks, they're amazing.
- 48:27I have the same set down in my bar that he sent to me.
- 48:31Outstanding, 3D, all metal, just amazing.
- 48:35Yeah, I couldn't believe it when I got those. I'm like, these are gold.
- 48:38He sent me, I have a Harrier, like a plan view of a Harrier, bottle opener.
- 48:44One side is Marine Corps flag. The other side is American flag. It's awesome.
- 48:50It's kind of the shape of the A, the A model, you know, a little more sleek.
- 48:54Yeah, yeah. Because where the outriggers are out by the wingtips instead of mid-wing. Yes.
- 49:03That was a slick little jet. holy smokes all
- 49:07right well back however here to Chubbs because he's got some some good stuff
- 49:12to chat about what where to go I've got some great stories here to talk about
- 49:19you know what so I told this story last week about a particular ornery,
- 49:27captain who was not real into having relief pilots on his airplane,
- 49:35And he would tell relief pilots, I don't want to hear from you.
- 49:39If you have something to say, turn the checklist sideways. Wait till I acknowledge you.
- 49:42And then I will take your input.
- 49:46Otherwise, sit there, shut the fuck up, and we'll go from there.
- 49:50So you're describing an absolute master at the art of cockpit resource management.
- 49:57Absolutely. Absolutely.
- 50:00Well, Chubbs happens to know that story is true. And Chubbs is the guy who took
- 50:05his airplane from him and went to England one night. I can't wait to hear this.
- 50:10Chubbs, would you tell us how all that came about? What do you know about?
- 50:14Yeah. How did it wind up getting to you? Of course, you're a Czech airman at the airline at the time.
- 50:22How did it wind up even getting to you? So I happened to be in the scheduler's office one morning.
- 50:29And the MD-11 standards manager comes into the office and said,
- 50:35hey, I've got to get this guy a line check tonight.
- 50:37Unfortunately, I wish it was
- 50:38Stansted, but we end up going to Atlanta out and back, AM out and back.
- 50:42I hate those. There's a good Stansted story about this guy, though.
- 50:46And so the standards manager looks at the schedule and goes,
- 50:49I've got to get somebody to do it tonight.
- 50:50And I happened to be in his office, and he wanted to have a standards check. Couldn't get small.
- 50:56No, I couldn't. And the scheduler goes, well, Dougie's here. He can do it.
- 51:01And so the standards manager goes, yeah, I'd rather just have a checker.
- 51:06And he looks at me and he goes, I will be in at seven in the morning.
- 51:10I know you'll do the right thing.
- 51:13Well, we show up. I show up an hour before showtime, which is like 2, 2.30 in the morning.
- 51:20If I was going to go to Atlanta and then lay over, you know,
- 51:23or sit there for like an hour, an hour and a half and come back and get back
- 51:25into Memphis about seven in the morning.
- 51:29So we go. I show up an hour before. I see the captain roaming around the crew room.
- 51:36And about five minutes before showtime, I see the first officer and I knew the
- 51:41first officer I'd flown with him before.
- 51:43And I came up to him and said, hey, man, I'm going with you guys tonight. His face turned white.
- 51:48And I'm like, what's going on here? What are you worried about?
- 51:52He goes, well, he busted a checkride. I busted a checkride. I said, dude, you're fine.
- 51:57It doesn't involve you. As long as you're going to try to kill us.
- 52:00Yeah. And he told me, he goes, I've been flying with the guy for two months.
- 52:03I go, really? I go, well, at Showtime, I said, where is he? He goes,
- 52:06oh, he's out at the airplane sleeping. Yeah.
- 52:09I don't have a problem with the guy sleeping on the airplane,
- 52:11as you can see, or Pete probably showed that. As long as it's in flight.
- 52:15Yeah, yeah. Well, even then, he had everything ready. But in the flight operations
- 52:21manual, there's a meet and greet where you meet your crew members,
- 52:23you go on the flight plan, the weather, and everything else.
- 52:26Well, this guy told me, he goes, yeah, he goes, I've been flying with him for
- 52:28two months. And he goes, the first time I met him was ACARS chimed on the airplane
- 52:33with the weight and balance.
- 52:34And he woke up and I introduced myself to him.
- 52:37I said, really? He goes, yeah. I said, okay. So I, luckily that night,
- 52:42the duty officer was in the crew room and I went up to him and I said,
- 52:45Hey, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to pull this guy off the airplane.
- 52:48But I said, would you go out with me? He goes, you want me to do it?
- 52:50And I go, no, I just want you to be there in case something happens.
- 52:53You know, I've got a witness.
- 52:55Go out. Captain, sound asleep. He's back like this in the seat,
- 52:59which is a good position to sleep.
- 53:01Not that I've ever done it in that airplane, but you know. Yeah.
- 53:04You've had friends here that. Yeah. I've had friends.
- 53:10So anyway, he, I, I tap him on the shoulder.
- 53:13I introduced myself and I said, you know, you just busted a line check.
- 53:17And he goes, what do you mean?
- 53:18I, and I read the chapter and verse, you know, of the flight operations, man.
- 53:23And I, he goes, well, I do this all the time. I go, that's the problem.
- 53:28Cause he checked airman from another airplane that complained about the lack
- 53:32of communication in the cockpit the morning before.
- 53:35So we boot him off the airplane that He goes back inside, comes back up.
- 53:41No, I was going to jump seat. Yeah, I was going to be in the check.
- 53:44You know what I'm saying? A jump seating check airman?
- 53:46Yeah. Reported it? Yeah, the day before. So that's how it got to you. Yeah.
- 53:50And so, moving from the flight, he comes back about five or ten minutes later.
- 53:55He'd left something on board. He's a perfect gentleman, you know.
- 53:59But then, you know, he goes inside and calls crew schedule. He says,
- 54:03hey, you guys got anything for me? Because I just got pulled off this flight.
- 54:06And they go, you're not qualified.
- 54:08You just busted a check, bro. Yeah, you busted a check ride. You are not qualified.
- 54:13He tried to pick up a flight. Is he got anything else for me? I just got pulled off.
- 54:19Maybe I can get some overtime. Get time and a half on another flight.
- 54:23So he gets a few months off. He was one of the original 30 pilots.
- 54:28And it was a big deal. The dirty 30, we called him. The dirty 30.
- 54:32He had never been the first officer before.
- 54:36Oh, street captain.
- 54:38But then they put him in the right seat for two years.
- 54:41Was it two years? I thought it was just six months. No, it was supposed to be
- 54:44two years. It may not have lasted the two years.
- 54:48But he was told that if there was ever another, and this is a letter that he
- 54:52signed, if there was another C.R. Minson, he would be fired on the spot.
- 54:56Oh, there's some motivation. They called them last chance letters.
- 55:00They'd issue them to guys and see. So you'll like the rest of this story, though, Pete.
- 55:05So he jumps seating to Memphis one night from Tucson on the 727.
- 55:09And we're sitting on the ground in Tucson. And the first officer is telling
- 55:13the story about the check ride. And he's got everything right.
- 55:17Very factual. Perfect. Until he gets to the point where he said that the check
- 55:21airman, the captain, got into a fist fight.
- 55:25I go dude it didn't happen that way he goes oh yeah
- 55:28they did this and it's like a really trust me dude that didn't happen
- 55:31he turns around and he goes how the fuck do you know and
- 55:33i go because that was the fucking check airman and he
- 55:36slinks down in his seat and i never
- 55:39heard him say another word the rest of the flight you know
- 55:45that's good that's one of those one of those tales that
- 55:48keeps grown and grown and next thing you know there were fists and
- 55:51cuffs hammer and a shotgun and
- 55:54yeah yeah i thought it was stanstead be
- 55:57just because my buddy scott you know he flew stanstead all the time this guy
- 56:01oh flash senior and was it was a flash yes yeah god rest his soul god who got
- 56:10the slowest growing prostate cancer on the planet and was dead in 18 months
- 56:13He was another Rickenbacker sent a seven pilot.
- 56:17So quick story about flash. Got to do this to you. Sorry. So 1993. Yeah.
- 56:26And Skull, who also has since died of cancer, and Skull wanted to get out. He wanted to be a suit.
- 56:32He wanted to go be a headhunter, a corporate headhunter, to hire guys.
- 56:38And his brother was doing that job.
- 56:40And I'm like, yeah, if you ever don't want to do that, if you want to fly for
- 56:43the rest of your life, let's go get our ATPs together.
- 56:46So Skull and I wander up to 1-800-ALL-ATPs in Richmond, Virginia.
- 56:51And he and I, you know, you do the weekend cram course to get your ATP back in the day. Yes.
- 56:57And Skull and I are there, and we run into Flash.
- 57:00And, of course, he and Skull, Flash and Skull are like, oh, this is great,
- 57:06wonderful, because Skull wanted to go to Ohio and thought, well,
- 57:09maybe I can get near a guard and still be a headhunter.
- 57:11And Skull lasted about a year, year and a half at Procter & Gamble and said,
- 57:15fuck this, I'm going back to flying. And he went to United.
- 57:20That headhunting job's a real job, you know? Yeah.
- 57:23They expect it. That's what he said. He said, you know, they expect results
- 57:26in the civilian world. And that, you know, that kind of sucked.
- 57:29But so he went back to flying.
- 57:30But yeah, so Flash and Skull and I were the three at the 1-800-ALL-ATPs.
- 57:36Both of them have since passed cancer. I'm a little scared.
- 57:40Yeah, no shit. So you want to know another good story about that, Captain?
- 57:45Yeah, let's hear it. So it involves Stansted.
- 57:49I was a first officer. I wasn't involved in it. But he used to carry our brain
- 57:55bags, you know, with all the JEP stuff.
- 57:57Right. 70-pound bag of books.
- 58:01Yeah. And the RFO was a SIMS instructor.
- 58:04So he gets out to the airplane and he sits his bag right behind the jump seat,
- 58:10which is up against the circuit breaker panel.
- 58:13Did you hear this? Yeah. So he goes, does his walk around the airplane,
- 58:18comes back, and he walks towards the cockpit.
- 58:22His brain bag and all the contents are dumped out in the back.
- 58:26Of the outside of the cockpit. All right. So I looked at the guy and I go,
- 58:31dude, I said, you know, he put his stuff in the bag and he flew the trip.
- 58:34It was a weekend stand-side trip or great trips. Right.
- 58:37But I looked at him and go, man, I said, you got one of three options and your
- 58:43option was number four. And it was wrong.
- 58:45I thought, you know, because it's a hostile environment there.
- 58:48I said, number one choice would be to just get off the airplane.
- 58:52Call a cruise schedule. This is what's happening. You know, I can't I can't work with this guy.
- 58:57Number two, you could escalate and take his suitcase and dump all the contents
- 59:02in the back of the airplane.
- 59:04That would kind of escalate, and he's going to be on the airplane.
- 59:06I thought the best idea was to take his suitcase, when he got ready to close
- 59:10the door, sit down on the steps.
- 59:12So he gets to Stansted, and he got shit for the weekend.
- 59:18But that was kind of the stuff that he did to people.
- 59:21And this was the same captain that you busted on the checkmate?
- 59:25Yeah, that was before I dealt with him. Oh, my gosh. Yeah.
- 59:29You know, and here's the thing. There were a couple of those guys.
- 59:33I flew with several of the Dirty 30, and most of them were wonderful gentlemen.
- 59:37But as you said, they never were first officers.
- 59:39They never understood it. These guys started as Falcon captains,
- 59:43and some of them were amazing. There's some great stories.
- 59:46There's a book called Overnight Success,
- 59:47which talks about the forming and foundation of FedEx and all that.
- 59:51And there was the gent who literally filled up
- 59:54a falcon on his personal visa credit card because the
- 59:58fbo that he was at said they ain't paid their
- 1:00:00bills and we ain't filling you and you know then he
- 1:00:03goes okay here's my visa card and fred smith
- 1:00:06cut the guy a check when he got back the next day said
- 1:00:09you know okay thank you for doing that and making sure that the product
- 1:00:12got delivered and you know here's your money so there
- 1:00:16were some of those wonderful guys one of my favorites was a
- 1:00:19gent only his last name his first name was lou and apparently
- 1:00:22he would write up you know things like left
- 1:00:26landing light is aimed four degrees too high i know who you're talking about
- 1:00:32that kind of shit yeah and so maintenance hated this guy and one of my favorite
- 1:00:38write-ups that he had and i i personally saw this swear to god it's true captain
- 1:00:42seat cushion too thin and maintenance signed it off.
- 1:00:46CND could not duplicate.
- 1:00:53That's, that's, that's spectacular. You know? Yeah. I remember flying with one
- 1:00:57of those guys, Pete, and he was number one in the company for probably five or six years.
- 1:01:03And I looked at him and go, so how do you, what do you bid? And he goes,
- 1:01:06I don't bid. I choose. I choose.
- 1:01:09But i better choose wisely because i'm going to get what i choose yeah that's
- 1:01:14true there were times look i've been senior and junior both and it actually
- 1:01:17got a little more difficult when i got some seniority because i was likely going
- 1:01:21to fly one of my first two or three choices,
- 1:01:24and that's a first world problem brother as they say you know yeah steve steve
- 1:01:30martin's definition of a first world problem is i think my masseuse is a little chatty but.
- 1:01:37But but having to fly something that you choose is
- 1:01:40it you know kind of go shit what
- 1:01:43what did i screw up how is it that i'm flying this oh
- 1:01:46no it's a good yeah you can't blame anybody else but yourself that's
- 1:01:49right you can't that's right well except during covid
- 1:01:52that was a different story so yeah that
- 1:01:56was weird that was just a weird time it was we
- 1:01:59flying international we were locked down you would
- 1:02:03go a week yeah so what did that look like exactly that's what
- 1:02:06the cockpit looked like oh my gosh yeah well
- 1:02:09you guys did well you guys weren't wearing your mask when you weren't on the
- 1:02:12ground right oh hell we weren't wearing them i've got a picture up of a of a
- 1:02:17flight deck with three guys wearing their mask in in covid days and it depended
- 1:02:21on the captain i i never did but i knew guys that made everybody wear their
- 1:02:25captain pre-flight during flight all that shit.
- 1:02:29Yeah the worst part fig was international sydney
- 1:02:32used to be one of the greatest that we had and it
- 1:02:35sucked we'd get locked in our room the only time
- 1:02:38you could go out of your room was to leave the hotel when
- 1:02:41you were going like leaving to go to yeah and
- 1:02:44then you go to guanjo to be locked up for another three or four days my gosh
- 1:02:47yeah and here's and this is why i will likely never go back to Australia we
- 1:02:55were escorted to our rooms by a police officer they gave the front desk handed
- 1:03:00the police officer or room key the plastic key card they would then escort us
- 1:03:04to the room and go leave your room go to jail.
- 1:03:08Yeah. And the key did not work to open your door. It was just for the lights.
- 1:03:13Yeah. Remember, remember if you left your room, you were locked out.
- 1:03:18So, and then they deliver your food at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
- 1:03:22Nevermind if you had to sleep nights or sleep days because you had to fly nights,
- 1:03:27they deliver your food at those times and your food would sit in the hallway
- 1:03:31getting cold or hot or whatever.
- 1:03:32And then if you didn't have your mask on, They had somebody sitting at the end
- 1:03:36of the hall who would yell at you if you didn't have your mask on when you opened
- 1:03:40your door to get your food off the table next to your door.
- 1:03:43Wow. Yeah. They'd knock on your door and run. Those people lost their fucking
- 1:03:47minds, man. Oh, they did. They absolutely did. It was horrible.
- 1:03:50Remember when you would go in and you'd have to get a nasal,
- 1:03:54you know, they'd swab your nasal stuff for your COVID test.
- 1:03:57And then you would have to walk the green mile. Remember walking the green mile to get out of there?
- 1:04:06They had this this hallway right and
- 1:04:09there's there's gates at each end of it it's a secure area
- 1:04:12right yes it's normally not used but you
- 1:04:15they'd walk you there you know they'd open the gate you walk down wait for it
- 1:04:20to close behind then they'd open the other gate to let you out i just called
- 1:04:23it the green mile well yeah i don't know oh remember the so you you tip the
- 1:04:29drivers and the drivers were not allowed to accept tips from us.
- 1:04:34Because they could have COVID on them. They claimed that they got this bad outbreak
- 1:04:40in Australia from pilots tipping the drivers.
- 1:04:43They'd either leave it in the seat or throw it in the trunk,
- 1:04:45you know, because our drivers were great. Yeah, they were good guys.
- 1:04:49Absolutely, they were. Unbelievable.
- 1:04:52Well, let's just put a dot on this and say that was the most fucked up period ever.
- 1:05:00Yeah. And, well, we've all learned a lot from that.
- 1:05:04Yeah, we did indeed. I used to, I actually brought a projector with me,
- 1:05:08a little mini projector about the size of a couple packs of cigarettes.
- 1:05:13And, you know, go spend three days in a Chinese hotel and I'd watch movies and
- 1:05:17order dinner and cocktails and it'd be movie night.
- 1:05:20You know, it's the way I, you know. One man party.
- 1:05:24I'd send up the exercise bike in the afternoon. I'd get my, you know,
- 1:05:2615 miles in on an exercise bike and then watch a movie in the evening and go back to sleep.
- 1:05:30You know, like just whatever you could do to keep your sanity.
- 1:05:34I have no idea how we did that shit, but oh, well, yeah, got a bunch of other good stories though.
- 1:05:42So you did some really cool shit as a, as a check airman, you did a thing that
- 1:05:47they called Pathfinder at our airlines because we brought some stuff in and
- 1:05:51out of some, uh, you know, kind of flying you were doing in the C-130 stick there. Fig.
- 1:05:56Oh, talk about that. Yeah. I want to hear about that. Yeah. What was the Pathfinder?
- 1:06:00MD 11, you had to be checked. You had to be invited. And it was always,
- 1:06:04They either, they were, Czech airmen did it, and so you get checked out,
- 1:06:09we go into Bagram, it was kind of cool in the MD-11, because you actually got to fly the airplane.
- 1:06:14You know, we go in at 29,000 feet and then dive as close to the airport as we could.
- 1:06:21This is a Bagram, you said? Bagram? It's a Bagram, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
- 1:06:25So, you know, at first we would go from there, we repositioned to Dubai until
- 1:06:31the Iranians figured out we were bringing in stuff for the military and then
- 1:06:35flying over Iran to go to Dubai.
- 1:06:37So we ended up going to Delhi after that. Guy Bosh on that. Yeah. Yeah.
- 1:06:42So one night I'm going in there and we were flying from old Han Air Force Base outside of Frankfurt.
- 1:06:52And we go into Bagram. Usually Baku was our alternate. Well,
- 1:06:57that night our alternate was Cologne, Germany.
- 1:07:00So it was a seven and a half hour flight down. And if we had to go missed,
- 1:07:05we'd have to go back to Cologne another seven and a half hours.
- 1:07:08Oh, shit. That was the that was the closest legal alternate. it
- 1:07:10yeah well because it's a military charter
- 1:07:14baku was the only place we could go into with the
- 1:07:17freight we had if we had to divert and the
- 1:07:20weather was down that night okay so we get into some classified freight and
- 1:07:24dis is there any chaff or flares not on the amd man not on the md 11 man right
- 1:07:30hey what year what year are we talking chubs what we're talking let me see I'm
- 1:07:35trying to remember, 2009,
- 1:07:398 or 9. All right. Okay.
- 1:07:42Yeah, I was there. I was there. Yeah, so we were getting lit up.
- 1:07:46Yeah, it was listening to shit. So we go to Bagram. Shit was real then. It was pretty awesome.
- 1:07:50Well, and we would go at night, you know, because the plan was we'd be on the
- 1:07:53ground for maybe an hour. They'd unload the air, and then we'd blast out.
- 1:07:56Yeah. Well, this night, we're going in, and with the clearest land,
- 1:08:01I could see the runway. I've got a HUD. I've got the—.
- 1:08:06Were you landing north to south or south to north? Do you recall?
- 1:08:09I have no clue. Okay. We were coming out. We were heading towards the mountains.
- 1:08:13Well, you probably landed north. Okay. I don't remember. But anyway,
- 1:08:18I can see the runway. We're clear to land.
- 1:08:21And about 500 feet, they go, airport's closed. Landing clearance is canceled.
- 1:08:26Say your intentions. I go, I can see the runway.
- 1:08:29Okay. He goes, okay, you're clear to land. We land about half.
- 1:08:32Yeah. What the fuck? About halfway down. it's almost zero zero down the runway
- 1:08:37the fog bank was rolling in oh my gosh and they were going to close the airport
- 1:08:43i'm like we can see the runway let us land so we got to spend the night at boggle
- 1:08:48how was that where did you sleep yeah they put you up at the hilton the hyatt,
- 1:08:53hold on a second i know there was nothing like that i want
- 1:08:56to know where you slept okay so so you
- 1:08:59know where the pat tillman center was right the us us center
- 1:09:02yes there's a big 100 man tent there yes
- 1:09:05yes this is in february right so we get in there and there's only places there's
- 1:09:13only cots at the front because they have this big airplane heater that's heating
- 1:09:19that place so up the front is where all the heat is.
- 1:09:23And in the back, it's nice. I was so hot. I did the Ritter Sport candy bars.
- 1:09:28I had one of those in my backpack. It melted.
- 1:09:31That's how hot it was at the front. Sleeping with 99 of your closest buddies.
- 1:09:36Yeah. But, you know, the interesting thing was. With a jet engine heating you up.
- 1:09:39Yeah. We woke up, you know, got up and the place was empty.
- 1:09:44And I did not hear anybody get out of that place. You must have been tired.
- 1:09:48Well, no. It's, you know, Army guys and Marines, you know, they're just like,
- 1:09:53They want to be quiet because they don't want to wake everybody else up.
- 1:09:56Well, that and the carbon monoxide.
- 1:09:58Well, yeah. Yeah, you're probably half the bag from that. You're almost dead,
- 1:10:02but, you know, it's no big deal.
- 1:10:03Yeah. So when we got there, I called crew scheduling, and I go,
- 1:10:08hey, this is the time we got here.
- 1:10:11And so we wake up, and we're like, we had to have 12 hours off,
- 1:10:14I think it was. So we were like the nine-hour, nine-and-a-half-hour point.
- 1:10:18And I look at the rest of the crew, and I'm like, we want to get out of here.
- 1:10:21So I call back, I call the crew schedule and go, hey, what's the earliest we can get out?
- 1:10:26And the scheduler tells me, I go, well, if I was mistaken in the time that we
- 1:10:31got off the airplane, could we leave earlier? She goes, yeah,
- 1:10:35what time did you get off?
- 1:10:36I told her, she goes, now you're telling me that you made a mistake.
- 1:10:39I go, yes, ma'am, I did. You guys are good to go.
- 1:10:42It was a horrible mathematical mistake. Yeah.
- 1:10:46It was broken. Yeah. Yeah, listen, I wouldn't have a voluntarily stayed one
- 1:10:52more minute there, you know, if I didn't have to.
- 1:10:56Yeah, the month before we had a crew that was there for three days.
- 1:10:59When they had the C-17. Remember when that C-17 landed gear up there? Yes.
- 1:11:04When an airplane landed there, and right after they landed, they're getting
- 1:11:07ready to taxi, and the C-17 landed gear up.
- 1:11:10Close the runway down. That was that. For three days. Yeah.
- 1:11:14Yeah. Shit.
- 1:11:19That's bad luck, man. Oh, shit. Yeah.
- 1:11:24And I think I went down there maybe five or six times, you know.
- 1:11:30Did you say you called those Pathfinder missions? Yeah. So the captain would
- 1:11:35bid. The trip was a bid-packed trip.
- 1:11:37Captain would bid it, and then he would get bumped off in Cologne or Frankfurt.
- 1:11:43And Pathfinder would deadhead over. We'd fly the leg into Bagram and then either
- 1:11:48Delhi or Dubai, wherever they were going to put the airplane back in the system.
- 1:11:51And then we would deadhead back, and the captain would pick the trip up there. Okay.
- 1:11:56So it was a pretty good deal for us. And Deadhead was a good deal,
- 1:12:00yeah, because you got first-class international.
- 1:12:03Hell, yeah. On an airline you know pretty well, Fig. Yeah.
- 1:12:09I'm a million-miler lifetime because of that. God bless America.
- 1:12:13And there's that C-17 sitting there on the runway.
- 1:12:18The float plane C-17 they have there on the runway. That took a lot of power
- 1:12:24to taxi. They finally gave up.
- 1:12:26They did, man. Right.
- 1:12:29I heard that what they did is they put airbags under it, you know, to lift it up.
- 1:12:34And then the base commander, somebody went up and put the gear down and then
- 1:12:37they were able to tow it off the runway. That didn't surprise me.
- 1:12:42Amazing. But this is the life that those Pathfinders lived.
- 1:12:48I've got a picture up now of Chubb's behind the bar in the back of an A380.
- 1:12:56Is that what that is? It looked like a Star Trek transport device.
- 1:13:00It does look like a Star Trek transporter.
- 1:13:02You're lucky you weren't transported to another planet while you were standing
- 1:13:07there. Oh, that is outstanding.
- 1:13:09Yeah, there's the lounge in the back of the A380, which is how those guys flew
- 1:13:13around the world. Look at that. Yeah. Yeah.
- 1:13:16Good stuff there were some there were some perks flying freight
- 1:13:19yeah oh yeah i get it
- 1:13:22totally and you didn't have to worry about
- 1:13:24you know pissed off passengers yeah
- 1:13:28or hey pete have you ever had a box bitch before at you not one time probably
- 1:13:32ever it didn't it didn't the only box that ever bitched at me had a chimpanzee
- 1:13:38in it who was pissed off because he woke up with a dart in his ass at two in
- 1:13:41the morning and then he woke up again in a cage in the back of my airplane.
- 1:13:48You want to hear a DC-8 story. One of my friends told me this.
- 1:13:52So they've got an airplane full of Reese's monkeys.
- 1:13:55And he said the monkeys were loud and they're throwing shit all over the place.
- 1:13:58Oh, no. You know, in the back of the airplane.
- 1:14:02So the engineer just dials the temperature down and goes back about 15,
- 1:14:0820 minutes later. The monkeys are like this shaking.
- 1:14:10Like, fuck, don't do this to us anymore. We'll be nice.
- 1:14:17I did that to a jump seater one night out in Newark. I helped him carry like
- 1:14:22this 75-pound bag up the stairs.
- 1:14:25He had like three bags. I carried one of his huge bags up the stairs.
- 1:14:30He didn't say thank you. He didn't say fuck you. He didn't say nothing to me.
- 1:14:34So I gave him his brief, and he nodded. He didn't say thank you.
- 1:14:38No, all right, fine, thanks.
- 1:14:39So I'm plumbing on the DC-10. I turned the temperature all the way down back there.
- 1:14:46And about the time that we were descending, we were going Newark to Fort Lauderdale
- 1:14:50at, you know, 4 a.m. or whatever.
- 1:14:53About the time we pushed the nose over to go into Fort Lauderdale,
- 1:14:56I went back to go to the head and he goes, could you turn the heat up?
- 1:14:59I go, that's all. I just needed to hear one word out of you.
- 1:15:07Walk to me, dude. Yeah. You could have said thank you. That's all you needed to do. You know. Yeah.
- 1:15:13Dizzy says that we couldn't get by an episode without talking about animal theme.
- 1:15:19Oh, that's true. Yeah. We used
- 1:15:21to do animal charters all the time out of Sydney back in the old days.
- 1:15:26Were you taking like horses, cattle?
- 1:15:30Cattle, pigs, donkeys, you name it.
- 1:15:34I've had horses. I had a Samachan tiger, chimpanzee, gooey ducks.
- 1:15:40You know what a gooey duck is? Yeah. Look it up. I've heard of it. Nope.
- 1:15:43Yeah, they're like a four-pound snail.
- 1:15:48What? Yeah. Okay. They're delicacies in Japan, apparently.
- 1:15:54I remember one night on the 7-4, we took a load of mules from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to Brussels.
- 1:16:03And then the crew took them on from there to Islamabad.
- 1:16:07It was the election night in 1988, and it was humanitarian aid for the Mujdahin.
- 1:16:14Yeah. They were carrying stingers across the Khyber Pass while they were shooting the Soviets. Yes.
- 1:16:22That's pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah.
- 1:16:27All right. We carry some interesting stuff, you know? Yeah.
- 1:16:31And the stuff we don't know we carry. It's scary shit. Right. Yeah. No kidding.
- 1:16:37There were times, you know, we had the State Department couriers on board.
- 1:16:43Even they didn't know how top secret the shit is they were carrying on the plane. Yeah.
- 1:16:49People escorting the cargo on your plane? Escorting the cargo.
- 1:16:51Yeah. And we would have captains go, denying you entrance to the jump seat.
- 1:16:57I'm not sure who you are. It's like, these guys have more top-secret compartmentalized
- 1:17:02clearances than you could make up.
- 1:17:05All my crash pad roommates did that twice.
- 1:17:10Did, did, did. Really? We had this lady one night on the 7-4. We're gone.
- 1:17:17We went New York, Boston, Chicago, Anchorage, and then the airplane,
- 1:17:22I think it'd end up in Hong Kong.
- 1:17:24And this lady is a courier and ask her, I go, you know, what are you on here
- 1:17:28for? She goes, I can't tell you. We get to Boston.
- 1:17:31I get, and this is on the 7-4. I get out. I'm going to do my walk run.
- 1:17:35I see a bunch of police cars at the back end of the airplane where the cargo door was.
- 1:17:40Mechanic comes running up. He goes, how much gold you guys got on the airplane tonight?
- 1:17:44She's like, she wouldn't tell us. And mechanics, oh yeah. How much gold's there,
- 1:17:49man? How much gold is there?
- 1:17:51Yeah, she wouldn't tell us. She didn't even want us to know there was gold on the airplane.
- 1:17:56The airplane might get accidentally landed somewhere else, I guess,
- 1:18:00with all that gold on there.
- 1:18:02Maybe. It happened the night we actually had a jet land in Stewart.
- 1:18:06It was on fire going Memphis to Boston, and it landed at Stewart Air Force Base in New York.
- 1:18:14And those guys saved the jet. They really did. But they treated them like criminals.
- 1:18:19There was tons of gold on that airplane.
- 1:18:24It's probably good that you don't know so that you don't start scheming.
- 1:18:29You're like, all right, here's the deal.
- 1:18:32We're going to fake an emergency. We're going to lower the cabin pressure.
- 1:18:38We're going to pass this chick out.
- 1:18:40And then we're going to land this plane and take the gold. and we're all going
- 1:18:43to a Caribbean island and we're going to live like the fucking sultan. Right?
- 1:18:51Oh, man. Well, the funny thing was the captain on that Stewart flight literally
- 1:18:55had a Memphis to Boston simulator the night before with a cargo fire in the
- 1:19:02simulator. I did not know that.
- 1:19:04Yeah, Bruce had a cargo fire simulated the night prior.
- 1:19:08Well, remember, Bruce later on got hit
- 1:19:11by lightning strike too and i saw him in india
- 1:19:14and i go bruce i said i don't want to fly with you man
- 1:19:17something bad's gonna happen because dude you want to fly with me i
- 1:19:20survived this shit exactly yeah
- 1:19:25yeah i haven't heard about him in a long time is he still with us do you know
- 1:19:29i haven't heard anything different so i'm assuming big boy bruce is 375 pounds
- 1:19:35if he weighed a pound and and that was on a slim day But I think he lost all
- 1:19:40the weight at one point. I don't know if it stayed off or not. Yeah.
- 1:19:44So, yeah, I don't know. I went way down a rabbit hole there.
- 1:19:48You also have a note in here about briefing a new hire on the first leg of IOE.
- 1:19:54I bet that was just amazing.
- 1:19:57So, 7 IOE, and we've got a jumpseater who's going to be the new LCA. Yeah.
- 1:20:04He's going to jumpseat up with us to Anchorage. How about getting hired to – how new hire to a 777?
- 1:20:11Well, remember, before it was the MD-11, and then it was the 777. So, yeah.
- 1:20:18So we got a jump seater who's going to be a new check airman.
- 1:20:22He's going to jump seat up with us, and he's going to observe me teach two legs
- 1:20:25the next two days, and I'm going to observe him teach two legs. It's the C2-D2.
- 1:20:30Yeah, C2-D2. So we're going up there, and Anchorage is the worst flight we had
- 1:20:35in the system. Don't you think, Pete? Why? Absolutely.
- 1:20:38Why was that? You leave at 2.30, 3 o'clock in the morning, first leg of a trip.
- 1:20:42And it's seven hours and 28 minutes, no RFO.
- 1:20:47Yeah. And it's quiet and dark the whole time.
- 1:20:51Yeah. So we're cruising up there and I look at my student. I go,
- 1:20:56Hey, how are you doing over there?
- 1:20:57You know, you tired or anything? No, man, he's I'm ready to go. He was wired.
- 1:21:01He hadn't slept all day, but he was wired his first time in the airplane.
- 1:21:04Oh yeah. I said, well, I'm gonna close my eyes for a few minutes.
- 1:21:08So I do. I don't know how long I was asleep. I wake up and I go,
- 1:21:11how are you doing? He goes, I'm doing great.
- 1:21:13And the jump seat was up there then in the jump seat. And I go,
- 1:21:17well, you know, if you're awake, I'll teach you something.
- 1:21:19So I always like to teach the comm suite on the triple seven.
- 1:21:24I like to go through every button push because students really didn't get it
- 1:21:28in the schoolhouse. So I, you know, I wanted to teach them everything.
- 1:21:31So I'm sitting there and I'm, I'm, I'm leaning down like this,
- 1:21:34you know, communications, everything, how to communicate on this airplane to
- 1:21:38the anywhere in the world.
- 1:21:39Yeah. And so I'm, I'm, I'm briefing them. And the next thing I know,
- 1:21:44these two fuckers start laughing at me.
- 1:21:47And I go, what's so fucking funny? And they go, you've fallen asleep three times.
- 1:21:52And when you wake up, you continue the discussion where you fell asleep.
- 1:21:58I go, well, fuck both of you. And I turn my head and I just lean back to my
- 1:22:02seat. I fall asleep again.
- 1:22:05Oh, shit. And you didn't know you were falling asleep. I did not. Not at all. Oh, my gosh.
- 1:22:12That's those micro naps, you know, that they talk about in the sleep studies and stuff.
- 1:22:18Yeah. So, so, I mean, that's a serious deal. How do you, all right. So how do you.
- 1:22:25That's, that's a normal schedule. How do you, how do you prepare your body for that?
- 1:22:30I mean, seriously, I, I found it was almost impossible.
- 1:22:35I tried to, I had a crash pad. I would go to the crash pad, try to sleep a little bit, but you know,
- 1:22:40you, you get there and you, you need to
- 1:22:43sleep probably i was good on three or four hours you
- 1:22:47know to go to asia
- 1:22:50or europe because we had rfo's but anchorage there's
- 1:22:53no you're never more than three hours from your next nap unless you're
- 1:22:56going to anchorage what's an rfo for our non-flight a
- 1:22:59relief flight for relief flight officer relief first
- 1:23:02officer we had our relief captains also sometimes and so
- 1:23:05and the purpose of those people were to do what so
- 1:23:08according to the far's if
- 1:23:12you and our contract regulations yeah our contract
- 1:23:16was over seven hours and 35 minutes as a pete where they had to have a third
- 1:23:19pilot anything over 11 30 or 11 35 for the fourth pilot okay yeah so they're
- 1:23:25to relieve the crew and basically they're everybody's flying you know every
- 1:23:30you change you set up your rest periods beforehand,
- 1:23:33so everybody knows how to be prepared to sleep.
- 1:23:37And that was, you know, sleeping in the back because we had really nice bunks in the triple seven.
- 1:23:42But I missed the MD-11 because we had a futon on the floor for a rest period.
- 1:23:48Futon on the floor yeah they didn't have
- 1:23:51literally yeah a futon on the floor where it
- 1:23:54was about 12 degrees fahrenheit yeah because
- 1:23:58the air is leaking in around the seal on the door so yeah
- 1:24:01and and these little tiny thin blankets that
- 1:24:04were you know whoever got their what do
- 1:24:07you call them the management bonus points did so by
- 1:24:10saving material on the amount of blanket material they actually
- 1:24:13put on these blankets it wasn't triple seven
- 1:24:16it said we got decent blankets decent blankets
- 1:24:20and pillows yeah because on the 11 they had the little airline pillows fig yeah
- 1:24:27and the that's what they gave us for our rest in the on the md11 unbelievable
- 1:24:32yeah so did you guys bring cold weather gear to,
- 1:24:38sleep in when you're laying on the futon sometimes
- 1:24:41yeah yeah if you were if you were lucky there
- 1:24:44were enough of those blankets where you could stuff them at the seal of the door and
- 1:24:47it would kind of warm it up some oh my gosh yeah either decide or you're either
- 1:24:52going to get frostbite on your feet or your head one of the two yeah that's
- 1:24:57brutal yeah i mean the shit we put up with sometimes just boggles my mind looking
- 1:25:02back at it now but that was that way before flying Tigers got bought,
- 1:25:06guys literally brown bagged their lunch.
- 1:25:09There was no catering. Yeah, that's what Tigers brought, catering.
- 1:25:15Every place we went, if it required catering, we could order catering,
- 1:25:19what we wanted to eat from the menu.
- 1:25:22Okay. Okay. And if you fail to order it, well, that looks like a 777 bunk right
- 1:25:29now. So that's a 777 bunk. It is.
- 1:25:32It's basically like a big coffin. I am familiar. Yeah. Those were good bunks. Yeah. They were.
- 1:25:40All right. Well, so what's the craziest shit you ever saw when you were flying in, you know?
- 1:25:48Air Force, airline. Yeah, weird times of the night.
- 1:25:52I mean, you know, other than like the Northern Lights and that sort of shit. Any...
- 1:25:59Hmm. Scratch your head. I don't know. Nothing really crazy. You know what I mean?
- 1:26:05Okay. You had to be awake to see that shit, right?
- 1:26:08Right. Well, there's that. Okay. I got two more notes from you.
- 1:26:12One is training review board and one is Medina Annex at Lackland Air Force Base for flight screening.
- 1:26:17We talked about the Medina Annex. What's the training review board about?
- 1:26:21What's that? So the training review board, it was set up.
- 1:26:25I just didn't think that the pilots were really serious about anything.
- 1:26:29Remember, Pete, and the contract. I never was.
- 1:26:33Yeah. So the TRB was you had somebody in the schoolhouse had a problem,
- 1:26:43you know, the training failure.
- 1:26:45Second failure. First failure, they automatically, you know,
- 1:26:49they get some extra training go.
- 1:26:51So a second failure, or they had other problems leading up to that or had done
- 1:26:55before, you go to the TRB, which consisted of two union representatives,
- 1:27:00which is training committee chairman usually, and the, what's the other one, Pete?
- 1:27:05I think human factors. Oh, yeah. Human factors were involved.
- 1:27:10Yeah. And then the managing director of training and standards from the company. Yep.
- 1:27:15Which, by the way, Chubbs was the MD of training at the company.
- 1:27:19Really? No, I was the MD 11. I'm training manager. So I don't know why I wasn't
- 1:27:24managing overall all training. No, no, just the MD 11.
- 1:27:28So, but the training review board is a really great program because, you know.
- 1:27:34Most people, as it was told to me, you don't work for 20, 25 years and all of
- 1:27:39a sudden you don't know how to fly.
- 1:27:41Usually there's something going on in the person's life or they've got some
- 1:27:45serious medical issues.
- 1:27:47And we had the leeway and it was always consensus from the company and the union,
- 1:27:52the reps, that, you know, this is what we think is best for the people going
- 1:27:57through. And, you know, how can we get them through the program?
- 1:28:00There were some people that had some serious medical issues,
- 1:28:04you know, that were found out just because of the training review board.
- 1:28:08Others had family issues that were causing problems.
- 1:28:12One guy had family issues and ended up when he couldn't make it through again,
- 1:28:16they sent him to an evaluation, found he had the early stages of Alzheimer's.
- 1:28:20Oh, my gosh. Yeah. So, you know, it saved people's lives. It saved their careers.
- 1:28:25You know and it was finally the company figured out that you know what pilots
- 1:28:29really care about what's going on and we can work with them so it was very satisfying
- 1:28:35you know because you get to help people i only did it for a year and i did something
- 1:28:39stupid and went into management.
- 1:28:43What were you thinking i don't know you know i the the manager was fired and
- 1:28:49so i went to his boss and i go hey who's going to replace this guy and he goes
- 1:28:53you are i go are you you You think I'm fucking stupid? I guess I was.
- 1:28:59Okay. But I only did it for 10 months.
- 1:29:03No, I remember that. And that was good. I remember when you did that.
- 1:29:06And in fact, I still remember to this day, it was one of those things.
- 1:29:10You had to actually deny me some time off.
- 1:29:13I had asked for time off. My youngest son was having some cardiac issues.
- 1:29:17He was like three years old, four years old, something like that.
- 1:29:20And then, uh, and you gave me the time off.
- 1:29:23Oh, yeah. I gave it to you. Yeah, you gave it to me.
- 1:29:26No. And then some other, a, a rod that was in my class decided he wanted time off.
- 1:29:33Because you know he lived in Fort Lauderdale oddly enough
- 1:29:36and when you said yeah no that's
- 1:29:39not how this works he wrote a letter to the senior VP of flight operations the
- 1:29:44chief pilot the senior VP of flight training and said well repeat got time off
- 1:29:50you know how come it's like are you kidding me so yeah so the extra time that
- 1:29:55I needed I kind of didn't get but you know well Well,
- 1:29:58you know, part of it too is, you know, as a manager is like,
- 1:30:02you know, or in a TRB too, it's like you look at guys and it's like,
- 1:30:06okay, they've got things going on.
- 1:30:07We can send them back through training, but they're not going to make it through
- 1:30:10because their life is consuming everything.
- 1:30:14And it's better to give them some time off to get things straightened out before
- 1:30:18you send them back into training. Yeah.
- 1:30:21Just not a whole lot of rocket surgery. Yeah.
- 1:30:25Oh, man. Well, we have been kicking this thing in the ass for a little over
- 1:30:29right at an hour and a half or so here, I guess. Is that possible?
- 1:30:33I know, right? I mean, it feels like 15 minutes, and here we are.
- 1:30:37So I want to find out what the hell you did when you found yourself rolling
- 1:30:4240, 45, 50 degrees on short final into Stansted.
- 1:30:48Yeah, at 1,500 feet. What the hell is that?
- 1:30:51You know, I just let the first officer fly the airplane. Oh,
- 1:30:55good. So yeah, I took the airplane over. Yeah.
- 1:31:01So what happened is when we put the flaps down, the flaps 50,
- 1:31:05as I said, the airplane rolled.
- 1:31:07So what I did is I said, okay, right away, I still have my hand on the flat
- 1:31:11panel, so I put it back to 35 and stopped rolling.
- 1:31:15And the first officer was fighting and did a really good job. He really did.
- 1:31:19So being the brain surgeon I am, there's a synoptic on the MD-11 where you can
- 1:31:24see what the flight controls are
- 1:31:26doing. I thought maybe we had a spoiler sticking up causing the problem.
- 1:31:30So I go, I pulled the synoptic up and I go, we're going to try this one more
- 1:31:34time. And we do it. And guess what? It did the same damn thing.
- 1:31:38So we go back, flaps 35, we landed the airplane.
- 1:31:42Well, we pull off the runway, we put the flaps up, and we get a hydraulic system number two failure.
- 1:31:49And I'm like, hmm, I wonder what's going on here. Well, what happened is we
- 1:31:54put the flaps up, the flap track, because there's a Fowler flap on the MB-11
- 1:31:58that's like 19 feet long and 5 feet wide,
- 1:32:01and it fell off the airplane at 1,500 feet, five miles from the end of the runway.
- 1:32:07And so I talked to the British version of the NTSB, and the guy told me,
- 1:32:14he goes, we found the flap about 10 miles from the runway. I go,
- 1:32:17no, you couldn't have because he goes, what do you mean?
- 1:32:19I go, we put the flaps down at 1,500 feet.
- 1:32:22We're five miles from the runway on the glide slope.
- 1:32:26Yeah. And he comes back to me about a half an hour later. He goes, we found the flap.
- 1:32:31It was in a parking lot of a pub, landed between two cars. Didn't hit either one of them. No way.
- 1:32:37I said, dude, I know how to bomb shit. And I didn't want to kill the cars, okay?
- 1:32:43But what happened is we lost the hydraulic system too because
- 1:32:46the flaps were off track and the md-11 has this big ball i think all airplanes
- 1:32:50do where it hit when the flaps come up it hits a stopper yeah well it was off
- 1:32:55track and it goes through the number two hydraulic system line oh just push
- 1:33:00it right yeah so severed it so we got a we got a day,
- 1:33:04and a half and stands dead instead of going to newark and then we deadhead at home.
- 1:33:08So so i i uh i want
- 1:33:11to go back to one thing and i think it's important to
- 1:33:15talk about especially for our non aviator listeners you when you had the you
- 1:33:22move something something bad happened and you're put it back to where it was
- 1:33:29before the bad part happened right that's something that we just if something
- 1:33:33if you move a switch or lever.
- 1:33:36And you have a negative result, the first reaction is, well,
- 1:33:40put it back. Yeah. And that's what you did.
- 1:33:43And that was my thought process. We call it John Wayne in it. It solved the problem.
- 1:33:47Well, because at that point, you don't have enough time to go through a checklist. Right. You know?
- 1:33:53Yeah. And it's funny. No matter what kind of airplane you're flying or who.
- 1:33:58That's a great point, Faye.
- 1:34:00I don't think we've ever talked about that. No. And he triggered that memory
- 1:34:04or he triggered that thought because, I mean, we still do that now.
- 1:34:07I mean, if you throw a switch or move a lever and you get a bad result,
- 1:34:14before you even think, you undo what you just did. Go to unbad. Yeah, that's right.
- 1:34:21Let's go back to where it was good. And most of the time, that solves your problem.
- 1:34:26And then you can go, okay, like you did. You're like, okay, let's reason this
- 1:34:31out. What really happened?
- 1:34:33But isn't that something? Well, you know, technically, probably we should have
- 1:34:37gone around because we had numbers for flaps 50 landing instead of flaps 35,
- 1:34:42which increases your landing distance by what? 500 to 1,000 feet.
- 1:34:46412 feet, 7 inches, 39 millimeters.
- 1:34:50How do you know at 7 inches, Pete?
- 1:34:53Yeah. So, but, you know, technically you should have done that.
- 1:34:56But it's like, okay, you got a flight control problem. We don't know really
- 1:35:00what it is. We're close to the ground. Let's land.
- 1:35:03Yeah. Why do you want to go around and maybe have bigger problems than what
- 1:35:08you get? You know, start. Yeah.
- 1:35:11Yeah. And that's another thing.
- 1:35:14So you're on a short final. You have something, some kind of non-normal happen.
- 1:35:22Is it better to take it around and sort it all out and maybe create a bigger
- 1:35:27problem or just land the damn plane?
- 1:35:29That is the age-old question. Yeah, I think land in the airplane.
- 1:35:33Y'all worked for us that time.
- 1:35:36You know, because here's the thing. If we go on around, we'd put the flaps up.
- 1:35:39Then we lost hydraulic system number two. Now we're dealing with a hydraulic
- 1:35:42problem as well as the flap problem. Yeah.
- 1:35:45And a no-flap landing. Don't. Oh, yeah.
- 1:35:49Look, my recollection on MD-11 hydrastics is low.
- 1:35:55But, yeah, the potential for creating more problems is definitely there.
- 1:36:03No flap, no slack. Because then you're raising the gear.
- 1:36:06No slack, your perch piece is like 200 knots. Yeah.
- 1:36:10And you're going to use more than that 412 feet, 7 inches. 7 inches,
- 1:36:1539 millimeters. Exactly.
- 1:36:18Yeah. It gets ugly early. I really enjoy talking to you, Chubbs.
- 1:36:25Just talking pilot shit's been awesome.
- 1:36:27And hearing your stories are just fantastic.
- 1:36:29Thank you for sharing. Thank you, guys.
- 1:36:32Best part of this show, man. I mean, this is an hour and 40 minutes.
- 1:36:36It seems like we've been talking 10 minutes, man. Gone.
- 1:36:40Gone. Yeah. Yeah. That's an hour and 40 minutes. You'll never get back, people.
- 1:36:47Aren't you glad you spent it this way? Because this is fantastic stuff.
- 1:36:51So we want to thank you for your service.
- 1:36:54Yeah, Jubs. Thanks for your service. Thank you, sir. Thank you guys for your service.
- 1:36:59And the militia. Your service in the Ohio State militia. The militia. That's right. Right.
- 1:37:03And also before we wrap up, we want to say thank you to all the men and women
- 1:37:07on active duty and in the guard and our veterans and our first responders.
- 1:37:11We're grateful to you, what you do. You put your asses out there on the line
- 1:37:15all the time and people don't have a full understanding of what you do.
- 1:37:19And we're grateful for that. So thank you.
- 1:37:22And just as important, their families, the ones that are holding down the home
- 1:37:26front, holding down the fort, missing birthdays, holidays, everyday moments,
- 1:37:32So that you can go out and do your thing. And we want to say a shout out to
- 1:37:38them and say thank you for that.
- 1:37:40Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And also to none other than Dave Hamilton over at
- 1:37:48Backbeat Media. Backbeat Media. Yeah.
- 1:37:52He helps us get advertising. But more importantly, Dave has also given us the
- 1:37:56knowledge and the know-how to actually get, Once we're done talking,
- 1:38:00this stuff has to get from recording status to you on the Internet.
- 1:38:06And Dave is the one that gave us the knowledge to make that happen.
- 1:38:10So thank you, Dave. We're deeply appreciative.
- 1:38:14Our bandwidth is handled by Cashfly, and advertising support also comes from
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- 1:42:49Indeed. That sound you're hearing in the background, well, that's the two Air
- 1:42:55Force F-16 pilots that make the whole service sound good.
- 1:42:58They got four albums out, not one bad song on any of those albums,
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- 1:43:09Excellent stories. They are true gentlemen and patriots. They have a distillery company.
- 1:43:18Or a spirits company. W-I-N-G-L-O-R-E.
- 1:43:23Wingmore. And Kimo and I sampled a little of that last week. And it is superb.
- 1:43:29It is superb. You quickly get to Joker. Then you've got bingo.
- 1:43:33Well, Joker's after you've cracked a bottle. It evaporates to Joker.
- 1:43:36I don't know, that's, right?
- 1:43:38I mean, well, that's like as soon as you start your airplane on a,
- 1:43:41when you're a single engine attack jet, you start your airplane, you're on low fuel.
- 1:43:45So that's how that goes. He's the wheels in the wheel of your joker.
- 1:43:50Yeah. So you can find the Dos Gringos music on Amazon Music,
- 1:43:54Spotify, or wherever you listen to music.
- 1:43:56So I don't know, Fig, what do you think, man? Until next time, stay safe.
- 1:44:39Hold on, Fig. It's what? He said it's over.
- 1:44:43Mistakes were made. I blame society. What?
- 1:44:48Weird. Ow!